New Australian movie suits “Physical Journeys”

I haven’t seen it yet, but I have read about it in the current Monthly Magazine (article not online). It would seem though that Romulus, My Father would be worth considering as a supplementary text for HSC students doing the Journeys Area Study, particularly with the poems of Peter Skrzynecki, but not only with that selection. School users please note YouTube is probably blocked; try again at home.

On YouTube you will also find a whole series of Director’s Diaries about the movie. This is Day 4:

There is a Romulus My Father website. You may also read Raymond Gaita’s book. See Robert Manne’s review.

 

Sorry Day and forty years of citizenship…

Adrian Phoon, among others, has remembered the significance for Australians of the past week. Two anniversaries coincide: the 1967 Referendum by which Aboriginal people would be included in the national census, which meant they would have the same citizen rights as other Australians. That was also the first year I voted. Naturally I voted “yes” along with over 90% of Australians. The second anniversary, of which Adrian speaks, is the ten years since the “Stolen Children” Report was published. That report has been attacked, but I think it stands up and remains the site of much unfinished business.

I have a whole page on related matters on my other blog.

Later

See on my personal site National Reconciliation Week 27 May – 3 June 2007.

 

A central Aussie icon

It is always interesting explaining Anzac Day to overseas students or visitors: You mean you celebrate a defeat?? I can recall a Chinese friend being mightily impressed by the first Anzac Day parade he saw as being unlike anything in China, though there are parades and national days enough there.

I tried to capture something of this on my personal site in April: Late Anzac Day thoughts, where you may also see some of my own connections to Anzac Day.

In that entry I refer to a recent television program, Andrew Denton’s Gallipoli: Brothers In Arms. This is well worth visiting.

 

Error correction in ESL

Something different today, a video. Now if all you see is a big space below, wait until you are home and try again! Many schools and agencies block YouTube.

7.41 minutes long. Posted on YouTube by MadridTeacher. There are more personal and ESL videos there.

 

Train station or railway station?

This post appeared yesterday on my personal blog. I thought it would interest people here too.

I am reading a very recent English crime fiction novel at the moment and did a double take when I saw the words train station. I am sure Sherlock Holmes would have been most displeased. Point is, when did we stop saying railway station?

Naturally I am not the first to ask. Christopher Howse deals with it in his London Telegraph blog.

“I’m sitting in the railway station,” sang Paul Simon, inspired, some say by Widnes. Others say he was waiting at the now disused Ditton station, on the Cheshire-Lancashire border…

Railroad station used to be common in Britain, as anyone who has read Trollope knows. It is never used now in British English, but train station is definitely becoming the preferred form over railway station.

One of his commenters gets huffy about it all:

The trend of hearing ‘train station’ more than ‘railway station’ in recent years is another example of the lazy use of language being perpetuated to an even worse degree now by texting ‘shorthand’. ‘Railway station’ is more traditionally correct (i.e a station on the railway system); ‘train station’ is a lazy modern alternative, probably deriving, as the blogger suggests, from ‘bus station (i.e. where you catch buses/trains). The use of ‘invite’ as a noun (it is a verb!) instead of ‘invitation’ is another example of lazy modern language appalling to us who love our language…

That of course is utter nonsense; I can’t see laziness having anything to do with it. I am always amazed at how many people run to moral judgement over such things. I must say, however, that the trend of hearing landed in my ear with a thud. Why is that, I wonder?

Back to the issue at hand. I can only recall train station in the past decade here in Australia. Of course most often we just say station, which probably indicates how dreadfully lazy we Aussies must be! Certainly we never said depot, but then neither do Americans these days, apparently. See World Wide Words.

Until recently, as I said, the almost total separation of terms between British and American English would have applied also to train station. But it appears that the term is relatively new even in the USA, where railroad station was once the norm. But train station is old enough there for us to be sure of the direction in which it has travelled, and vigorous enough to oust the older term. Perhaps its introduction followed the logic of one of my younger staff. When I pointed out some years ago that she used train station, she replied that of course that was the right term: she caught a bus at a bus station, and so she would expect to board a train at a train station. Obvious really. Why didn’t we all think of that before?

I’m sticking to railway station. Sutherland never had a train station, not while I was living there anyway.

Later

I seem to have struck a chord with the train station versus railway station entry. Thanks for the comments, Thomas and David, and anyone else who joins in. Perhaps I should have a language fetish section…

I also found a new (to me) reference site while pursuing this bit of trivia: The Visual Dictionary. It appears to have been written in French and the English on the front page reflects that very clearly. Once inside, however, you will find a really great site. Or you can opt to read it in French!

 

Interesting cultural policy take on Virginia Tech

I wrote a very long post after the Virginia Tech shootings, reflecting on a range of cultural issues that are also relevant to Australia. While being in favour of gun control, I did not pursue that aspect much.

Korean-American Christian Hyepin Im has since posted on the God’s Politics site. She argues that Asian Americans have been starved of government support because they are seen as “model immigrants”.

There is no denying Seung-Hui Cho was one sick individual whose wild rampage was senseless and tragic. At the same time, I can’t help but mourn and wonder whether or not this tragedy could have been averted if Seung-Hui had early intervention. For too long, Asian American communities have been ignored or left out of policy, program, and funding decisions under the justification of being “model minorities.” Only recently, studies are acknowledging that monolingual Asians and their families are under-served in this country. Such short-sighted decisions are costing many innocent lives, and taking a huge toll on the community and the country. For example, juvenile delinquency for Asian Americans has increased while it has decreased for other groups in the last 20 years. Asian Americans suffer from high suicide, depression, and domestic violence rates.

A very informative post, and possibly relevant here in Sydney.

 

Death of Professor Marie Clay

Who? New Zealander Marie Clay developed the Reading Recovery Program which is a feature of infants schools in NSW. When some years ago I did a research project in the poorer suburbs of S-E Sydney I saw this program in action and was very impressed by it, and by the skill and dedication of its trained practitioners. While Marie Clay always insisted it should be used only at a certain age, I think its principles can apply at any age. It does have its detractors, though very often one suspects they are not immune to ideological agendas of their own, or are advocates of some rival approach competing for implementation and therefore often government dollars.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald carries the following obituary.

Dame Marie Clay championed the idea that children who struggle to learn to read and write can be helped with early intervention. Her Reading Recovery program has been used with striking success in many schools in the English-speaking world.

Before the 1980s it was common educational practice to ignore early reading difficulties in the hope that children would “grow out of” their problems, with the result that many youngsters fell further behind, some condemned to a life of illiteracy.

The concept of Reading Recovery arose from Clay’s close observation of what really happens when a teacher and child work together to make the child a reader and a writer. She concluded that however puzzling and illogical a child’s responses might be, they arise out of some sort of internal logic, which every child develops to make sense of the world and language.

That logic may be shaped by confusion, misunderstanding or partial knowledge. If a teacher could somehow understand the child’s thought processes and if the teaching could start from the child’s “cognitive system”, then it might be possible to help him or her to find more effective ways of thinking about reading and writing.

An essential component of Reading Recovery is the training of teachers to observe, analyse and interpret the moment-to-moment behaviour of their pupils when struggling to read and write, and to design individual programs to help them. The key, Clay taught, was flexibility.

Reading Recovery success rates have been impressive, with eight out of 10 of the lowest-attaining six-year-olds lifted to levels of literacy appropriate to their age within months.

Marie Clay, who has died at 81, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and qualified as a primary school teacher in 1945. She earned a master’s degree at the University of New Zealand in 1948 and went as a Fulbright scholar to study for a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Returning to New Zealand, Clay taught primary school children at Wanganui. In 1955 she moved to Auckland with the Department of Education’s new psychological service. In 1960 she joined the University of Auckland to help create a new diploma of educational psychology. She remained at the university for 25 years, becoming New Zealand’s first female professor in 1975.

In 1976 she began work on what became known as the Reading Recovery program, based on the development of observational tools for the assessment of a child’s progress, research that was brought together in An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (1993). Reading Recovery has been used in schools across the English-speaking world and adapted for Spanish and French languages.

Clay received many awards and accolades, and in 2003 was voted the most influential person in the field of literacy over the past three decades at a survey of the National Reading Conference of America. She was appointed DBE in 1992. In 2002 the Institute of Education in London marked its centenary by awarding Clay an honorary doctorate in literature, presented by the Princess Royal.

Related:

Literacy discussed.

 

In praise of WordWeb

I downloaded this little beauty some years ago. My coachee Damien was so impressed when we used it in tuition a few weeks ago that he asked how he could get one and was amazed to learn it is free. Read about it. The only odd thing is the condition of use: Use of the free version is subject to license terms: it may not be used by people owning an SUV and taking more than four flights a year.

I have just downloaded the new version, which includes three additional free online features integrating it with Wikipedia and an online dictionary search. The basic program works off-line.

Related:

I’m a poor speller. Can you help?.

 

Physical journeys and Peter Skrzynecki’s poems

Revised March 2008

Peter Skrzynecki (above) must be one of the most popular choices for the Journeys Area of Study in the NSW HSC English courses. I have yet another coachee studying his work right now. There is so much good stuff available online!

The obvious starting point is NSW HSC Online for an overview of this part of the course. Very early in your study you must be clear about what you are doing, because you need to filter all the information available to make sure your efforts are relevant. I recommend also careful examination of past HSC questions and published exam answers to refine that filtering. While looking through HSC Online you may also find some guidance here and in other parts of your course in the annotated resource guide for teachers (but also useful for curious students): Search Site Reviews.

Your next stop might be Peter Skrzynecki’s Web Site.

On this site you will find information about my life which may help you understand some of my poems – especially those set down for study on the New South Wales HSC syllabus.

It contains a background to my family’s migration to Australia in 1949 and a general outline of those influences which led to my writing poetry.

It also contains links to other sites where my work is featured, a list of my publications, a selection of reviews of various publications, poetry and prose, and poems from my most recent collection of verse.

Amelia Illgner wrote a good brief introduction to Peter Skrzynecki: The immigrant experience for the 2004 Sydney Writers’ Festival Schools Program. This is no longer online, but the gist was:

Australian poet Peter Skrzynecki knows about journeys the way other people know about real estate, stock options and the footy ladder. Skrzynecki is a living treatise on the immigrant experience and his poems are charged canons of his observations. They tell of travelling, of belonging and the innate beauty in discovering oneself and rediscovering home and, always, memory…

Here is a more recent poem by Peter Skrzynecki (2005). I rather like it; do you? Where does it fit into the journey stories you already know from the poems set for study? Is it similar/different in style and tone? Would you keep all the poems currently set, or would you substitute this poem for one currently set? If so, which poem would go? Why delete that poem in favour of this one?

WARNING: Do not use another poem by Peter Skrzynecki as a supplementary text.

Summer in the Country

Summer in the country
was brushing away
flies from your face
and wiping sweat from your eyes—

watching grasses and grains
shimmer in paddocks
or sheep and cattle
grazing beyond a windbreak of pines.

Galahs clanged over the homestead.
A windmill turned
when a breeze sprung up.
Cockatoos screeched from the pepper tree.

Only crows frightened me
with their sorrowful cries
and the way they flew slowly
like black crosses.

The old slab-split shed
was a treasure-trove
of harnesses, bridles, farm
machinery, forty-four-gallon drums—

its walls covered
with cobwebs that housed
unimaginable spiders
but where it was cool inside.

I didn’t miss Europe
like my parents did—
nor a Christmas without snow
I’d hear them talking about.

Summer in the country
was being given a glass of cold lemonade
and falling asleep
under a red-gum’s shade.

You will find a forum here where students have contributed some ideas, especially about “Crossing the Red Sea” and on possible supplementary texts. Use it wisely but don’t quote it! [This forum has apparently been hacked. 9 March 2008.]

Peter Skrzynecki (and Michael Gow) were interviewed on ABC 702 in October 2006.

…Richard Glover: All right, Peter, you rat for doing this to our children. “To what extent has studying the concept of physical journey in the work of Peter Skrzynecki expanded your understanding of yourself, of individuals, and of the world?” Now you’re answering the question, what do you say?

Peter Skrzynecki: I say it teaches me about perseverance, it teaches me about tolerance, it teaches me about hope, it teaches me that nothing comes easy without working for it.

Richard Glover: No, no, no, I’m marking you down. You’ve got to say all this in relationship to the concept of physical journey in the work, you’re not relating it to the question, Peter.

Peter Skrzynecki: Because no journey is just physical. I’m sitting here in a doctor’s surgery actually waiting for root canal therapy while I’m talking to you, so I’ve made a physical journey from my home to here, but no journey is just physical, you know, it’s emotional, it’s spiritual, it’s psychological it’s mental. I’m about to have some holes drilled into my tooth…

Richard Glover: Now Peter, do you feel any sympathy for these studying your work?

Peter Skrzynecki: Yes and no. When I said to you earlier, one way or another you’ve got to sit for an exam, whether it’s poetry or whether it’s something else. I feel sympathy for them because at this stage in their lives they’ve really got to be somehow told or shown that life isn’t just about exams, and unfortunately the system, such as it is, puts them into an exam situation, but having taught in schools and at university myself, you somehow look beyond that, and when I talk to students when I lecture, I try and make them think for themselves.

Richard Glover: And the other thing about this discussion is it’s great that among all the classics, and there are lots of classics of things like Mark Twain and Shakespeare’s Tempest and Coleridge, amongst all this there things like Michael’s wonderful play Away and your wonderful poems.

Peter Skrzynecki: The year after the war, I mean we went on a physical journey from Europe to Australia, we lived in migrant camps, hostels, detention centres as they were called. There were no Social Service benefits in those days. If you wanted to get ahead in this country, you had to work, that physical journey was the start of a whole new life. And I learnt from the lives of my parents, and you could look around you to some of the big names in the corporate world today like the Lowys and the Richard Pratts, they came here with nothing virtually.

Richard Glover: And the physical journey reflected.

Peter Skrzynecki: That was just the start of something bigger.

Richard Glover: Well look, you’ve almost made up your marks. I think you’ve got the same mark as Michael now. Very well done.

Peter Skrzynecki: All I can say to the students, ‘Don’t hold it against me’, and I hope you’ve learnt something from the poems.

Richard Glover: Yes, fantastic. Now Peter, thank you very much for talking to me…

He shows some realism about the course there, doesn’t he, and a sense of humour. Let’s face it, while I don’t mind this course the whole thing, from a poet’s point of view, is really quite mad! No poet has ever sat down and said “I think I will write poems about the concept of journey…” At least I don’t think they have. If you are clever, by the way, you will also see you have a real example of the radio interview text type to study there too. Could come in handy…

A few basic questions to ask yourself about every text you encounter in this Area Study:

– What does this text contribute to my understanding of the concept of “the journey”?
– How is the idea of “journey” represented in this text?
– What connections are there between this text and others I have viewed or read?
– What differences are there between this text and others I have viewed or read?

I am sure you and your teachers will think of more!

Migrant camp

See How welcome were the immigrants made to feel? which includes Peter Skrzynecki’s “Migrant Hostel, Parkes, 1949-51″ with questions. [This is currently returning a 404 error, which may mean it has gone or simply that there was a server issue when I tried to access it on 9 March 2008.]

And…

There is an excellent site on “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, one of the texts in the Stimulus Booklet. There you will find a number of critical readings of that poem.

Here is a Powerpoint Presentation on Journeys suitable for ESL, Standard and Advanced. IT IS NOT MY WORK! I found it somewhere but have not kept track of where, so if it is your work please let me know. And thanks for doing quite a good resource which I have shared with people I have tutored. Journeys Powerpoint

Note

Amendment to English Stage 6 Syllabus: Withdrawal of stimulus booklet for HSC 2008.

Update

The Weekend Australian (8 March 2008) has a review of Skrzynecki by Barry Hill, poetry editor of The Australian: Love alone cannot bring verse to life.

His work is much taught in schools, and in 2002 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his contribution to multicultural literature, a reputation that began with the publication of There, Behind the Lids in 1970, when he was only 25. The title poem begins:

Feel the trembling, there, behind the lids,
when you close your eyes and press
index finger and thumb against the hard sockets:
against the darkness…

This is tender, heartfelt; and it is not about the poet (as one would expect of a first book) but about the poet’s migrant parents, or people very like them who might cross over chasms and oceans to return to new landmarks.

Many slept on deck
because of the day’s heat
or to watch a sunset
they would never see again –
stretched on blankets and pillows
against cabins and rails:
shirtless, in shorts, barefooted,
themselves a landscape
of milk-white flesh
on a scoured and polished deck

This is from Crossing the Red Sea. Plain diction, a lucid arrangement of the graphic, and a touch for the image that resonates metaphorically: these are typical of Skrzynecki at his best. Once he applied these techniques to his school days, his parents’ quiet lives, the dreams of his parents’ friends, he soon had a gallery that represented a whole epoch of Australian-European history, each picture haunted by a subtle sense of what remained dark and unsayable as settlements sprouted in the new country…

Barry Spurr’s 2003 study guide is available in part on Google Books.

There is a good resource on Immigrant chronicle by Peter Skrzynecki a rap (NSW Department of Education site).

 

Help with academic writing

In addition to the sites listed under “Writing” in my Links, here are a few good sites I have found recently.

Rhetorical functions in academic writing. You will find:

Describing objects, location, structure and direction
Reporting and narrating
Defining
Writing instructions
Describing function
Describing processes, developments and operations
Classifying / categorising
Giving examples
Including tables and charts
Comparing and contrasting: similarities and differences
Generalising
Expressing degrees of certainty
Expressing reasons and explanations / cause and effect
Arguing and discussing
Writing critically
Writing introductions
Writing research methods
Writing research results
Writing research discussions
Drawing conclusions
Writing research abstracts

Each one is illustrated with real examples. Very good for upper secondary and tertiary students.
Here is a university level Example Academic Essay illustrating through highlighting in-text citations, referencing, quotations, summaries and paraphrasing. The site it comes from is English for Academic Purposes, practically a whole online course in academic writing. (English Language Centre of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.)
Writing for Academic Purposes is a comprehensive online text (in frames) from Using English for Academic Purposes: A Guide for Students in Higher Education by Andy Gillett, School of Combined Studies, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. The parent site also addresses other aspects of EAP. Very good. Includes exercises.